Tuesday, August 29, 2006

An easy way to simulate scrolling credits is to use a very long jpeg or png image and use camera automation in order to scroll from the top part of the image all the way to the bottom of it. The one issue that has been called out on the Cinelerra boards is that the default camera automation is done using bezier curves. So, what'd you'd see by taking the defaults is that the scrolling would quicken at the beginning and the end of the automation, but be somewhat linear in the middle. The steps below show how to straighten out the curves in order to make the scrolling linear from beginning to end; in other words, a constant rate of scrolling all the way through the automation. Thanks to Nicolas from Paris for the directions!

- turn on the X and Y camera position indicators in the View menu- click on the "Generate keyframes while tweaking" small key icon in the Timeline or Compositor- for the scroll beginning, modify the Y position of the camera, in the compositor window. You can also click the "?" icon to enter the value directly- at the end of the scroll, click and then I go back 1 frame to edit the Y camera position again- go back to the main window and select "Camera Y" in the view menu.- type "Alt-F" to modify the "Camera Y" green line height to see it entirely on the video track- click on the start keyframe while typing "CTRL" to modify the keyframe curve slope- do the same for the end keyframe in order to get a straight line between the start and end keyframes

After tweaking the settings, the scroll speed becomes nice and linear.

Notes*for libdv-0.104, you must remove libdv-1.0.3 first which is used by *many* programs*for mjpegtools, conflict msgs w/dries mjpegtools-libs*OpenEXR path problem on build, create sym link to /usr/include/openexr

Thanks to Brendan Conoboy for suggesting the libdv-1.0.4 upgrade. Really sped up my playback framerate from about 9fps to 30fps.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

The Projector is responsible for the shaking title effect. With "generate keyframes while tweaking" option selected, I created the shaking effect manually by moving the X/Y coordinates of the projector randomly in the compositor. I added further jerkiness by resetting projector coordinates manually via the X, Y, Z projector coordinate tool. I set the coordinates to 0,0 sometimes and then wildly negative and positive numbers (-264/+300) for real bouncy titles. I enabled the video track with titles only:blurTitleShake400K

After the shaking title experiment, I then completed the picture by adding a second video track with a Freeze Frame.blurTitleShakeVideo3MB

Timing fade outs and the proper freeze frame position were somewhat of a chore, but since I will be repeating this same sequence with different video and titling three or four more times, I should have the process optimized after finishing the last one.

Boy, does that blur effect take forever in Cinelerra. And my box isn't a slouch: P4, 3.2Ghz, 2GB of 400DDR. For this short, four second video, it took 4.5 minutes to apply the blur effect on the title at DVD resolution using YUV4MPEG & FFMPEG. Ridiculous. Here it is though:blurred title

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Sil680 Not Recognized by FedoraOK. I'm tired. Going to make this quick. Sil680 ATA RAID0 stripe set not recognized automatically by Fedora. Tried reinstall of Fedora. Does not recognize the RAID0 set I created. ARGH.

Saved by MDADMI had to dust off my very, very rusty Linux RAID creation skills and manually create a software RAID set. In short:- fdisk to mark the drives as part of a raid set- use mdadm to make the raid set active- create a mdadm.conf for the array- put it in /etc/fstab- format the stripe set

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 32 mounts or180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

Congrats to me/Girlfriend Doesn't CarePretty good for a guy who didn't know mdadm before tonight. So yeah! RAID0 set works! Hoohah! Copied a movie to it and then tested it in Cinelerra. HOLY SMOKES! Getting 50fps on a 1280x720 HDV movie! Damn that's fast! I can't understand why my girlfriend doesn't care about this at 1am??!

Woops with GhostOK. A minor foul up in the steps from the last post. Seems that Ghosting the utility partition is not working as expected. Norton Ghost created a total new partition at the end of the XP partition on the 80 gigger. So, I went ahead and deleted it, as this 2GB partition eats into my Linux root partition. I never used the utility partition anyway, but I thought that Ghost would have correctly selected the 100MB partition I had chosen. Oh well. I'm not that concerned.

FDISK is for F*@K!Another foul up was trying to use a Windows 98 boot disk and the classic fdisk program to both create the XP/Linux partitions and mark one as active. Word to the wise: DON'T USE FDISK! It has an annoying habit of "Verifying Drive Integrity" that takes FOREVER. So, I just decided to reboot and use my old 40GB XP system to carve up the drive and mark the 30GB partition as active. Saved a good deal of time there with that brainstorm. Phffflt!

Going SLEOOWLY.Applying the XP image to the partition designated for it went super smooth, but the Dell has this ugly habit of taking forever to start up when I have the power to some disks plugged in and some not, but still connected to my Sil680 IDE stripe set RAID card. Frustrating, as it adds two minutes at the front end of every boot cycle. Argh. But now I have my XP system back up and running on my new 80GB drive! Hooray!

Core 4 from Scratch..with a bad CD!I've decided that installing Fedora Core 4 from disks will make life cleaner. I could apply a partimage of my FC3 build or take the time to reimage the FC4 system, but I just want this to be over, so I am now in the middle of reinstalling FC4. The install has been crapping out on the Open Office RPMs. Seems there is a bad spot on the CD for them, so I deselected those packages for install. Only took me three FC4 installations and an hour to realize that I should do this. Oh, I'm just not very smart. :(

New MemoryEarlier this week, I had called TechDepot on the mistaken assumption that the memory speed drop to 333Mhz was due to the wrong Kingston memory being sent. So the Depot sent me another pair (at an unhealthy $187 per). So, after battling during the week with a conflict between my older Corsair (non-ECC/400DDR) and my new Kingston memory (ECC/400DDR), I decided to throw in the towel and use the older DDR in my audio editing rig and use both Kingston clips in the Dell video box. Installation was a snap, as all four Kingston clips were the same. Now I am running at full 400Mhz/Dual DDR/ECC POWER! Nothing like an upgrade!

Move the System DrivesRight now, the steps to moving the system drives are quite a few:1) boot with Ghost disk2) save an image of my XP system drive3) save an image of my XP utility partition4) sweep clean the 80GB drive I have in the system by backing my Fedora Core 3 partimage files to USB drive5) remove 40GB drive6) reformat and repartition the 80GB for two systems (XP and Linux)7) apply recent XP image to XP partition8) reinstall or apply Linux image to Linux partition

Right now, I am waiting for Ghost to finish creating the XP image. Talk back later.

Why Mule?

"Mules are not really stubborn. They can seem lazy because they will not put themselves in danger. A horse can be worked until it drops, but not so with a mule. The "stubborn" streak is just the mule's way of telling humans that things are not right. Mules are very intelligent and it is not a good idea to abuse a mule. They will do their best for their owner, with the utmost patience."About Mules